Re: Copying an object

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw iprimus com au>]

Russell Shaw wrote:
> Hi,
> I have C structs containing data and pointers to other objects and data.
> It is like OOP in C. I need to make a copy of an object, but found it is
> really tedious in C. The data in the struct can be copied, but you need
> to recursively follow pointers, do a malloc, then copy the data that was
> pointed at, into the new malloced area.
>
> Is there an easy way to do it? Can g_object do it? C++?

On second thoughts, it is like the action of a C++ copy-constructor.

An N-ary tree can be copied because you know what each node is, so you know
which members are pointers to other nodes. However, if you want to copy a
tree of arbitrary type nodes at run-time, you need to find what node members
are pointers, so run-time "type" information is needed. I have lots of
pointers to small structs of various types, and it would seem to be a
fair bit of typing to convert them all to g_object things.